Musings at Mustvee / A Poem at Peipsi

Church on Spilled Blood, St Petersburg
Originally uploaded by rtw2007.

Hello
My name is Helen.
I am a girl.
A tired girl – it is late.
Usually I live in England,
But at the moment I live in a van.
In a car park.
In Estonia.
People stare at me as they walk past.
I don’t think that they are used to seeing people like me.

This is a poem (Ed.: literary masterpiece, I think you’ll find) written by Helen (who has completely lost the plot now) whilst she was sitting in the van in Mustvee, a small town on the shore of Lake Peipsi in North East Estonia. Even the guide book acknowledges that very few people ever make it this far out and even the Estonians are wary of this “Russian” corner of their country. Mustvee is a small town in the middle of what is referred to “Old Believer” territory, one of several villages founded by a bunch of Russians who ran away to establish extreme Christian sects on the banks of the lake in the 17th century. And then nothing much happened until 2007 when a British camper van turned up and parked in the main square for the night… much to the amusement of the local children and alcoholics. Note it is much easier to be an alcoholic in Estonia; you can buy a litre and a half of Turbo Diesel (8%) for about 80 pence.

Anyhow, I digress – how was St. Petersburg? Excellent in fact, although the weather was a little up and down. We were lucky enough to get a couple of excellent sunny days during which we ran round most of the major sights. We spent a good three hours in the Hermitage exploring at least some of the immodesty and opulence of successive Russian Tsars. The Hermitage appears to have about 300 rooms full of stuff that has been stolen from other countries around the world and is now presented as Russian heritage. The main thing that hit me about St. Petersburg was the quality of all the buildings, there are so many palaces, churches etc that in the end they just merge into the background when if they were anywhere else then they would each be the stand out tourist attractions. We enjoyed photographing the slightly ridiculous Church on Spilled Blood and the Singer building as well as braving the Metro System – deeper and busier than London and a journey only costs 28p.

Helen deserves a medal for allowing me to drag her all the way to the end of the main street, Nevsky Prospekt (2.5km), just to look round the main Moscow Station – she even put up with me raving about the quality of the rail network map on the wall which was fantastic. Unfortunately all this excitement eventually pushed over the edge (actually her cold just wouldn’t shift and she didn’t fancy the blizzard which had set in overnight) such that I was forced to spend the final day by myself. I headed to Kunstkamera for the much vaunted display of pickled mutants and malformed humans but unfortunately it was shut on Mondays so I had to make do with another wander down Nevsky, but this time into a driving headwind with snow and sleet flurries.

The next day we negotiated the roads out of the city and avoided the ever present stares of the Traffic Police to emerge on the road the Peterhof, Peter the Great’s Palace about 30km down the coast. Peter may well have been Great but he certainly wasn’t modest or shy of building himself nice big palaces to hang out in. Careful reading of the history books (well, the ‘History and Background’ section of the Lonely Planet) reveals that he also wasn’t shy of torturing his own son to death – something not mentioned too often on the tourist information boards around town. Anyway, Peterhof was another fantastic place to look round. Although we didn’t brave the enormous queue for the main palace, we spent an hour or two just sauntering round the beautiful gardens in fantastic sunshine and admiring the statues that are littered liberally around for all to enjoy. There is a very stark and unavoidable contrast between the enormous apartment blocks that dominated the outskirts of every Russian town that we visited and then the incredible palaces with gardens that go on for miles that lie just a bit further out.

After this little detour, it was back on the road, following the atlas towards the border with Estonia. This was now much easier to follow as we had got the hang of some of the Cyrillic alphabet; although we’re not quite up to full speed yet. We got on the M11 and sped towards Kingisepp where our overnight accommodation had been ‘booked’ by the ever so helpful staff at the hotel in St. Petersburg. Unfortunately Kingisepp appeared to be a lot of a backwater with no hotel that we could find, so after doing a couple of lengths of Karl Marx Prospekt we decided to cut our losses and head for the border. Leaving Russia was fortunately much easier than entering and the border guards were very friendly – we ended up with time to grab food and have a wander around Narva, the Estonian border town, before bed. The location at the border is fantastic; Russia and Estonia meet at a narrow river with a single bridge crossing. Then on the cliffs at either side of the bridge are two opposing forts – facing each other about an arrow’s fire apart. It reminded me of fairytales of opposing kingdoms…. and less romantically playing Crossbows and Catapults with Potto when younger.

So, we woke in Estonia and drove through more atrocious, snowy weather to here; yet another place that could fairly be described as the middle of nowhere!! So far this evening we have had three visits from the Politsei at our overnight camp here (in fact a police van and a police car have for some reason joined us as the only other occupants in our square, hopefully not for reasons associated with us). We will now explore central Estonia for a few days before heading back north to Tallinn to meet Mum who is coming over to stay. Hopefully the weather won’t be too good so that we have a good excuse to explore the many coffee shops in Tallinn Old Town.

Tensions are fairly high in Estonia at the moment after a Soviet war memorial was removed from the city centre of Tallinn. This caused outrage in Russia and amongst the large Russian population in Estonia and led to rioting last week. So far, the only evidence we have seen of this trouble (aside from Russian news coverage) is a small (peaceful) student protest; lots of roses placed at the Soviet memorial in Narva; and the fact that none of the shops in Narva were selling any alcohol, so as to avoid fuelling the fire. None of that here – you can buy as much Turbo Diesel as you like in these backwaters.

Points of interest to date – diesel in Russia is only 30p/litre; St. Petersburg is the 4th largest city in Europe; miles covered so far – 2050; most popular album on iPod – Artic Monkeys; in Finland you can pay for bus tickets by text message and you get a discount on the price of a sauna if you are a conscientious objector; and in Estonia they sell baked beans in glass jars.